In The Graveyard (Remastered)

Album review

By the time Dead Moon started pouring forth their extended run of no-bullshit three-chord records in 1988, co-founders Fred and Toody Cole had been married for two decades and had raised three kids. Rock & roll lifers, the Coles lived on a big plot of rural Oregon land in a house they built themselves and did their own thing. Among them: listening to wild rock and/or roll records and, when the time was right, making some of their own.

Born amid the Pacific Northwest on the cusp of becoming the center of the grunge and riot grrrl explosions, Dead Moon moved through the 1990s minus any hipster buzz. They self-released their first two singles, and did so using the same vinyl cutting lathe that carved "Louie Louie," the Kingsmen's rock & roll classic, into the grooves. Between 1988 and 2006, the band released ten unimpeachable studio albums.

Those first two singles, released on their own Tombstone Records label, form the backbone of In the Graveyard, Dead Moon's debut album, which has just been reissued on Mississippi Records. A feral bunch of short, sharp songs that tap the unfettered let's-start-a-band determination of the Seeds, the Troggs, White Stripes and the entire roster on the classic garage rock compilation Nuggets, the trio (Fred on guitar, Toody on bass and drummer Andrew Loomis) sings about murderous love ("Parchment Farm," "Hey Joe"), battle-scarred PTSD ("Dead in the Saddle"), rebellion ("Out on a Wire"), running away ("Don't Burn the Fires") and, on Toody's cover of Elvis Presley's "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You," devotion.

Three-minute capsules that carry within them melody, emotion and feral yowls about the human condition, Dead Moon songs are pomp- and pretense-free, so sturdy they could support a stack of anvils. On opening song "Graveyard," Toody lays down an electric-jug-inspired bass line that mimics the 13th Floor Elevators' classic "You're Gonna Miss Me." Fred borrows a Cramps technique—the descending-scale guitar line that opens "Human Fly"—on "Out on a Wire." On the classic prison song "Parchment Farm," the married couple sing, in unison, "I feel like I could be here for the rest of my life—and all I did was shoot my wife." When, in the classic jam "Hey Joe" a few songs later, Fred once again bellows about a wife killer, Toody and Loomis crank out an urgent, getaway-style rhythm that suggests that the husband, too, should watch his back.

There's a certain irony in celebrating Dead Moon's defiantly lo-fi debut album on a platform, Qobuz, known for its high fidelity excellence. On In the Graveyard, sibilant hiss is a defining part of the equation, one that sets the songs in the same pretense-free environment where they were made. Whether recorded on a tape deck or through a million-dollar console, Dead Moon cracked the code: a killer song is a killer song. © Randall Roberts/Qobuz